Your human soul longs to connect with Spirit
To connect to Spirit—whether God, Allah, Higher Power, Source, or the Universe—your nervous system must be aligned with safety and not firing in protective mode. The reality of being human is that while we’ve been taught that our spiritual self, our Soul, operates independently of our physiology, each exists within the container of the other.
Your body’s protective mode must be in the OFF position to access your Soul’s inner light and wisdom.
Connection Requires Physical Safety
To be clear, protective mode is an essential response of your neurophysiology to keep you physically safe, i.e., alive. When your brain reads a situation as unsafe, led by the Vagus nerve, your nervous system drops into danger mode, which fires fight-or-flight accordingly. The nervous system galvanizes all the other systems: the heart, muscles, lungs, hormones, and even the stomach. This is intended to protect you in the ways it thinks it needs to protect.
If you are in an unsafe situation, nothing else matters, nor should it. Your programming tells you to leave or hide. Thank your body for this.
However, your very human system has been programmed for various unsafe situations over the years, and it can activate itself when there isn’t an unsafe situation. It can also deactivate you if this has worked in the past. This is all in service of you.
Stay Centered to Stay Connected
When you need to stay centered and access your wisdom during a hard conversation or when you want to meditate but struggle with racing thoughts that create tension in your body, you are experiencing that
tension between the human body and your Soul.
Your breath can get you to a calm place. When you slow and deepen your breathing, you engage the safety portions of your nervous system. Being present with something simple in your space, like a favorite scent,
animal or beautiful plant brings you into the moment.
Use touch, a silky pillow, or petting an animal to help you connect to where you already are. Don’t fight your body. Work with it. Treat it with the respect it deserves. When you try to make your body “submit” so you can have a different experience, you are needlessly creating more tension within it. Thank it for showing up, but let it know it’s safe now. It is this moment that you can control. It is the present moment that is safe.
Humming or formal mantras will help your body as well. Like the breath, it is activating the softer connections in your system. You don’t have to know formal mantras to do this. Just hum at a frequency that feels comfortable.
Connect with Your Soul and Spirit
As you drop into a feeling of physical safety, your brain and nervous system shift back into patterns that can access higher reasoning. You will feel your inner light. Give it time. Not every meditative moment will be the same experience, and not every quiet practice will have the same connection. However, each safe connection will build on the past one as your body more easily begins to read safety cues. This experience of feeling physically safe brings you into your spiritual connection.